In Our Time last time

Fifteen years ago this week the BBC's In Our Time show dedicated one of its shows to the subject of climate change (H/T Leo Hickman). In a break from its normal practice, Melvyn Bragg was joined by only two guests, only one of whom could even loosely be described as an academic. Sir John Houghton, the then chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, would best be described as a scientific administrator, having previously been the chief executive of the Met Office; George Monbiot is of course an environmental campaigner and journalist, although for the occasion - perhaps hoping to be taken more seriously - he also described himself as visiting professor of philosophy at the University of Bristol.

2000 was an interesting time in the climate debate. With the world having just entered the third millennium, thoughts of catastrophic futures seem to have found fertile ground and the global warming scare was therefore starting to gain ground. The IPCC's Second Assessment Report had laid the foundations for the scare a few years before; the ink was barely dry on the Hockey Stick papers and the onslaught of the Third Assessment was not far away. This is the context for the BBC's decision to use an environmentalist and a environmentally minded bureaucrat to provide what the corporation calls "due balance".

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Gongs

It's New Year's Honours list time once again here in the UK and as always I peruse the official list with interest looking out for familiar names from the climate debate. As with last year's list there is little that will get readers excited, with only an OBE for Tim Palmer of Oxford in the list and Palmer is is at least a member of the sensible brigade.

One other name that caused me to raise an eyebrow was someone called Stephen Stamp, whose citation explains the reason for his OBE as follows:

Operations Team Leader, Environment Agency. For services to the Environment and Flood Risk Management. (Highbridge, Somerset)

Given the shambles that led up to the flooding of the Somerset Levels last year, I'm not entirely sure that I'm comfortable with someone involved in flood risk management in that part of the world getting a gong, but it's hard to say for certain.

A parody?

When I started looking at this video by YouTuber "Veritasium" I thought it must be a parody. It just seemed so daft. But having studied the rest of his work I think he must be serious, and all the strawmen arguments, cherrypicking, out of date data, and plain old mistakes are actually his best shot at a contribution to the global warming debate.

You could almost play a game of bingo with it. See how many you can spot:

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Sans ifs, sans buts, sans everything

Judith Curry quotes this sentence from Peter Lee's GWPF essay on climate change and ethics

Omitting the ‘doubts, the caveats, the ifs, ands and buts’ is not a morally neutral act; it is a subtle deception that calls scientific practice into disrepute.

I couldn't help but recall the reaction from climate scientists when I said it was "grossly misleading" of Keith Shine to omit any caveats when explaining the efficacy of GCMs to parliamentarians.

I stand by what I said.

Niceness at home and abroad

Shub Niggurath is bemoaning the lack of venues in which there can be conversations across the lines of the climate debate.

Good discussions used to take place, on occasion, at WUWT or BH. There were brief periods when the old Collide-a-scape blog and Bart Verheggen’s site provided such moments. They are hard to come by now. Maybe the consensus and conspiracy poison spread mindlessly and artlessly throughout the blogs by certain people is to blame.

He's right of course. I have struggled long and hard to make BH the venue where that can happen, but it seems that a visit from, say Richard or Tamsin is guaranteed to get some people riled, with the result that moderation becomes a full-time occupation. I can't afford to spend that amount of time on it.

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Ouch

Chris Rapley has turned his hand to stagecraft, penning a new play about - you guessed it - climate change, which is being staged at London's Royal Court Theatre. Not bad for a first-time author! Here's the first review, from What's on Stage:

Had it been more interestingly presented, it could have amounted to the starkest message on a stick ever mounted at the Royal Court. Instead, it's probably the worst play ever seen on that hallowed stage, convincing you that the world can't end quickly enough if this is all we can expect from the so-called home of new writing.

Ouch.

Lew fan gong

Reality sometimes has the extraordinary ability to outdo even the most ludicrous works of fiction and the award of this year's Maddox Prize is certainly a case in point. The prize is awarded by Sense About Science for 'courage in promoting science and evidence on a matter of public interest' and this year the judges have picked an Oxford academic and Guardian columnist called David Grimes. Here is an example of his heroic work:

A series of investigations published last year by Prof Stephan Lewandowsky and his colleagues – including one with the fantastic title, Nasa Faked the Moon Landing – Therefore, (Climate) Science Is a Hoax: An Anatomy of the Motivated Rejection of Science – found that while subjects subscribing to conspiracist thought tended to reject all scientific propositions they encountered, those with strong traits of conservatism or pronounced free-market world views only tended to reject scientific findings with regulatory implications.

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Technology issues

A few days ago I wrote about the reactions to a talk given by polar ice specialist Peter Wadhams, whose utterances at a Royal Society conference had elicited a mixture of amusement and amazement because of their lack of scientific rigour.

In an interesting development it seems that Wadhams has retaliated by attacking the conference organisers - Gavin Schmidt, Mark Brandon and Sheldon Bacon - for the latter two, writing letters of complaint directly to senior officials at their universities. The response of the organisers is here, and it's quite amusing, as it seems that Wadhams is even holding them responsible for things tweeted by people outside the meeting.

Update on Oct 8, 2014 by Josh

Posted by Josh: This reminded me that I was able to attend a couple of the RS Arctic sessions and which included Peter Wadhams' talk. With all the busyness of the rest of the day visiting Bristol I had forgotten to scan in the cartoon notes, so here they are.

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Cartoons by Josh

In honour of Nigel Calder

This notice of a meeting to honour the life and works of Nigel Calder has just been published.

Nigel Calder 1931-2014

Memorial meeting

Royal Astronomical Society
Burlington House
Piccadilly
London W1J OBQ

Tuesday 2 December 2014 at 4pm

Followed by an informal reception 5-6pm

This is to let you know that we are arranging an hour-long programme of talks celebrating the life and work of the science writer Nigel Calder.  Speakers are to be confirmed but will include his co-writer and friend Professor Henrik Svensmark. This event will take place on 2 December, which would have been Nigel’s 83^rd birthday.

Further details, including how to reserve a seat, will be published on Nigel's blog on 11 November.  In the interim, any enquiries may be made by phone to 07771 620433.

Thought for the day, tricky edition

In the wake of the suggestion that Lewandowsky organised a lot of soft questions for Michael Mann after his Cabot Institute lecture, I was thinking about Mann's apparently interminable book tour. I wondered if there is any record of Mann ever having been on the end of a difficult question on one of his numerous public appearances.

Perhaps readers can suggest examples.

The Royal and the Arctic

Updated on Sep 22, 2014 by Bishop Hill

Updated on Sep 22, 2014 by Bishop Hill

The Royal Society is holding a scientific meeting today on the Arctic and climate change, beautifully timed to coincide with the annual minimum in Arctic sea ice. Unfortunately, the ice, which looks to have passed the minimum over the weekend, has recovered again this year, so no headlines were garnered.

Readers can see a bit of what is going on at the meeting by visiting the RSArctic14 hashtag and it looks pretty interesting. I was amused to see that Julienne Stroeve seems to be tentatively suggesting that the recovery in Arctic sea ice in the last couple of years has made the GCM predictions look rather clever. Put next to their failure in the Antarctic, it feels more like luck than judgement, but perhaps that's just my natural cynicism about climate models.

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The inescapable urge to indoctrinate

The latest edition of School Science Review, a journal of the Association for Science Education, is a climate change special, featuring a review of mainstream positions on global warming by Eric Wolff and a host of other articles covering everything from how better to get children on board the global warming bandwagon to a look at biofuels.

Most of it is paywalled, but you can see the covering editorial here, although to tell the truth it's not particularly exciting. I was struck only by this sentence:

Some teachers may not agree that it is our duty to campaign but we surely have a duty to inform our students where the science is clear, and it is important to teach them about what is complex and uncertain and not known.

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A marvel and a mystery

Updated on Sep 11, 2014 by Bishop Hill

A warm welcome to the climate blogosphere for Kate Marvel, a theoretical-turned-climate physicist at the Lawrence Livermore laboratory.

Dr Marvel's new blog can be seen here, and the first couple of posts make fascinating reading. Today's effort is right up my street, considering the empirical evidence for global warming.

[I]ncreased carbon dioxide warms the lower atmosphere (closer to Earth), but cools the upper atmosphere (closer to space).  I will probably write more about this later but for right now you'll have to take my word for it (or go here).

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Of orcs, goblins and climate change think tanks

As afficionados of The Lord of the Rings will no doubt know, the dark lord Sauron created orcs as corrupt mirror images of the elves. He created goblins in similar fashion, with dwarves in mind. This thought came to mind when readers pointed me to the Energy and Climate Intelligence Unit, a new think tank on the block here in the UK, which I can't help but see as the goblin version of the GWPF.

Set up by a group of green charitable foundations, the ECIU is to be run by our old friend Richard Black, not quite fresh from his previous role as an 'impartial' journalist at the BBC. The list of advisers is also interesting, featuring a dazzling array of well-known names and not a few vested interests as well.

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A new survey

A new survey of climate scientists has been published. The author team is headed by Bart Verheggen and includes John Cook. Here's the abstract:

Results are presented from a survey held among 1868 scientists studying various aspects of climate change, including physical climate, climate impacts, and mitigation. The survey was unique in its size, broadness and level of detail. Consistent with other research, we found that, as the level of expertise in climate science grew, so too did the level of agreement on anthropogenic causation. 90% of respondents with more than 10 climate-related peer-reviewed publications (about half of all respondents), explicitly agreed with anthropogenic greenhouse gases (GHGs) being the dominant driver of recent global warming. The respondents’ quantitative estimate of the GHG contribution appeared to strongly depend on their judgment or knowledge of the cooling effect of aerosols. The phrasing of the IPCC attribution statement in its fourth assessment report (AR4) providing a lower limit for the isolated GHG contribution may have led to an underestimation of the GHG influence on recent warming. The phrasing was improved in AR5. We also report on the respondents’ views on other factors contributing to global warming; of these Land Use and Land Cover Change (LULCC) was considered the most important. Respondents who characterized human influence on climate as insignificant, reported having had the most frequent media coverage regarding their views on climate change.

Having Cook on the author team is obviously going to lead many people to write the paper off without even taking a look at it. When you are proven to have set out to write a paper to meet a predetermined conclusion, that is the way people will treat your work. 

But I'm sure we will all look at the paper carefully. Thoughts in the comments please.